I’m 35 and grew up on the Internet chatting on AIM and chat rooms as a teenager, and Discord feels very much like that. I like it a lot and vastly prefer it to text messaging or Facebook messenger.
It’s super nice because they can set up channels for only some subset of the everyone on the instance, and because I admin it, I can see everything that goes on there if there’s an issue. I don’t expect issues, but the fact that I’m the admin means that a lot of her friends’ parents who are otherwise relatively strict allow their kids to use it.
Setting the boundary of 'you can use Discord and only this channel I've setup for you and your friends' works if you've spent their whole life setting reasonable boundaries that you discuss with them. Just like an adult, reasonable boundaries are more likely to be complied with.
To the specifics, they could create a new account/server, but it's really obvious on the server list (set a unique server icon). Discord doesn't have parental controls (e.g., you can't set a settings PIN so the settings can't be changed), but there are a lot of server controls you can setup to restrict access (like really short invite times, for example).
It's honestly not something I'm worried about. I'm just saying that using the server I set up is the path of least resistance for them.
Asking for a friend, who is into 133t vv@rez.
People here (NL) barely use iMessage. They use WhatsApp mainly. I prefer (and do use mainly) Signal. For group chat, Matrix. Though Discord is (unfortunately) very popular. I dig it only for gaming.
* single chat client (not a plethora on many platforms these days)
* ability to set online, offline, away, invisible (basically if you're available or not, whereas Facebook/Instagram/Slack don't really have that same separation and even the ones that do tend to not be as popular)
* Single-purpose platform, no other social media needed to carry it. i.e. Instagram's DM's are tucked away. Discord is technically single-purpose, but it's also at its core a social media platform, you need to join servers/Discords for all the separate things you're into, etc. so it's also not a single-purpose platform).
Out of all of them I like discord the most, but it's not hard to find problems even there. (weird scrolling, nearly useless search). I miss custom clients.
Plus, while I like the integration gifs images and some emojis, I generally find it overused in almost all servers I am on.